Happy day after Memorial Day!

The 'it didn't snow!!' edition.

The first year we lived here it snowed Memorial Day weekend. Last year, we had a terrible hard frost right before Memorial Day, killing almost all of the counties apple and cherry blossoms and most of my tomatoes. This year I am smarter! I planned for this. I have enough tomato plants in my upstairs closet that I could replace all the tomatoes in my greenhouse and still have some left over.

So, of course, this has been the nicest spring since we've moved here. Some friends say it's the mildest spring in the past ten years. So...anyone need any tomato plants?

The greenhouse is full and so far there haven't been any casualties. Keith keeps warning me that I've been planting too early, and in most years he'd be right, and it's still to early to say he isn't, but so far so good!



Hot peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, tomatillos, eggplants have all survived May in the greenhouse, now hopefully June is successful as well!



Another year gardening, another experiment. Just about everyone who gardens around here swears you can't grow corn around here. And maybe they're right, but hopefully I am.

My friend Dionne and I have decided that these people don't know what they're talking about and we are going to grow corn. Not on the 'knee hight by the fourth of July' plan, but on one that works here. I ordered some Early Sunglow Corn from Nichols Nursery. The description sounded perfect: A superior corn for on the cob freezing because of its very high sugar content and ability to retain the fresh corn flavor. Disease resistant; grows under cold, adverse conditions. Four foot tall plants produce two or more ears of golden yellow kernels that are narrow, sweet and tender. And it's supposed to only take 62 day to mature (although I'll believe it when I see it!).

We planted about a week and half ago and about 2/3rds of the seeds have sprouted. And man, does corn look like grassy weeds when it sprouts!


Hopefully the view will inspire the corn grow it's whole 4 feet!

Meanwhile, in the garden: the rhubarb looks just about big enough to eat someone whole and has it's goofy looking flower popping out of the top. I love this crazy plant that I don't take care of at all and it just bounces back from winter like Godzilla!




The past couple weeks around here have been beautiful! All the trees are flowering and everything is green, it's really been amazing! While I can still feel Old Man Winter's breath on my freshly sunburned shoulders, I am trying to shake him off as best I can and enjoy this spring that feels like summer as much as possible!

We be lambing!

When it comes to looking for the signs that a ewe may be lambing soon, one of the main signs (before all the goo) is just that they lay down a lot. Well, that's not really helpful!

Since we got the sheep, poor Chocolate Swirl has been so huge that walking was clearly hard for her, therefore she laid down pretty much all the time. Everyday for the past two and half weeks, I was certain that TODAY had to be the day and obviously most of the days I was wrong, but eventually I had to be right!

Here she is a day or two before lambing.



Last Wednesday night, Keith and I went to bed a little early thanks to stopping a TG's for dinner and couple pretty strong beers. I was completely sound asleep (at 11:30) when Keith woke me up with news. He heard loud moaning/baaing sounds from outside. It was clear something was happening: either Chocolate Swirl was lambing or Sam the Ram got out and was making his way to the ladies.

Keith went outside to check it out and it was clearly time for lambing! By the time we both got out there with towels and everything, the lamb was already born. Mama was just standing there, like 'what the hell just happened', so Keith and I grabbed the towels and wiped the lamb off a little bit. In about 30 seconds, Mama shook off being stunned and got to work cleaning up the little lamb herself, all while the little, wobbly lamb is trying to hard to find her feet. The whole this was pretty incredible to watch.



One thing that surprised me about this whole experience was how quiet it was. After the initial moaning, both Mama and lamb were quiet, as were the rest of the sheep and goats that were in various places in the barn. Chocolate Swirl and her lamb were in their own stall and all the rest of the sheep were up and attentive, but didn't make a peep (which is really unlike them!)



We cleaned off the lambs umbilical chord and waited. We waited to see if she was going to have another lamb, she was so huge we expected more than one. Then, when it looked like there was only going to be the one, we waited for her to start nursing. This took a while.

The lamb tried to nurse on just about everything including Mama's ears, tail, and the wall of the stall, before she finally found what she was looking for. When she finally did, her tail was going crazy and we knew that our job was pretty much done. We got Mama a bunch of hay and water with a little molasses in it (because that's what the book said to do) and I really have no idea how we eventually got back to sleep that night.



We left Mama and lamb in their own stall for about couple days, where they spent time curled up together, bonding. I only went in to fill food and water. We let them out in the pasture and all weekend they were pretty much velcroed to each other.



Can we talk for a minute about how freaking cute this lamb is! She's looks like a mix between a border collie, a cow, and a Rorschach test, I have named her Bessie. At a week old, she is running around like mad, bouncing off the other lambs, while poor Mama is running after her, with a 'come back here right now, young lady!' attitude! She is also as big as the the triplets that are a little over three weeks old.







In other news, can you tell from the picture that all the sheep are shedding their hairy winter coats?! The one surprise from this is that the one I thought of as White Chocolate (there is also Milk Chocolate and you all know Chocolate Swirl by now), she's actually a ginger underneath that crazy coat! I think it makes me like her just a little bit more.



The goats a doing fine. I'm pretty sure Cupid has been successfully knocked up, but that doesn't stop her from escaping. Snowy just want cuddles, as always, and Franny seems to have joined the sheep herd.

Hopefully we'll be having a kid or two in July. Until then, no new additions are planned, but that doesn't mean they won't happen!

Ducklings first day in the pond

This group of ducks is so much more cautious than our last group. Granted none of them got pneumonia this year, so they were probably handled a little less. I'd rather a bunch of scaredy ducks than a bunch of sick ones! Still, they are crazy adorable!





The ducklings seem so much bigger once they get out in the big world! Our other 4 ducks have been going crazy trying to figure out who these new creatures are. They haven't really decided how to approach this situation, so they just hide out in the chicken coop. I'm sure they'll relax soon!

It'll be nice to see a little more color in our little flock of ducks. Instead of 3 Welsh Harlequins and one Blue Swedish ladies, there will be a couple of Rouen's, an Runner, a couple more Blue Swedish (maybe one is male??) and maybe 2 more Welsh Harlequins (not really sure!)

While we don't have any new lambs yet, I'm pretty much constantly out in the pasture. When we first got the sheep, they were reasonably cautious and would move away from us any time we would be out and about. Now, my presence is positively snooze worthy. Just fine with me, I can get closer to take more pictures!





Wow, the videos uploaded from YouTube look kind of terrible! I'll work on that and hopefully they'll be better by the time we actually have new lambs. Gotta get back outside!

Easter Lambs!

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted last! Being out of town last week made me realize that it's spring everywhere else and while there is a chance of snow this week, I'm embracing springtime!

A funny thing happened at TG's a couple weeks ago. Keith and I were approached by a friend to get a flock of sheep together. And not just any sheep, the exact kind of sheep I've been wanting! They are Dorper/Katahdin hair sheep. What is a hair sheep and why would I want them? Because they have hair, not wool which mean you (ME!) never has to shear them. I'll learn to do a lot of things-sheep shearing is not on the list! They are also pretty hardy, more resistant to internal parasites and since they don't produce wool, they do not produce lanolin. Lanolin is associated with the smelly or strong flavor some people don't like in lamb, and these folks don't produce it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and yesterday we got our flock of sheep! We have 7 ewes (one still pregnant), 7 lambs, and one ram (Sam the Ram). Sam is kept apart from the ladies until breeding time. As you can see, he's a fine looking ram! Oh, and that's his winer coat he's sheading-pretty cool!



And the lambs, good lord they are adorable! Frolicking around the pasture, chasing each other. Then curling up together, sleeping in the sunshine. I mean really, do they get any cuter! Both the ewes and the lambs are pretty calm and don't seem to mind me hanging around in the pasture.




But, of course, these are not the only new animals we have. We picked up a few more duckings a few weeks ago. At 3 1/2 weeks old, these ducklings are huge and will hopefully be ready to live outside, full time in a couple of weeks. I just moved them out to the greenhouse to help me with a little weeding (they've been great at it!) and because their space in the garage smells so eye wateringly bad, that I just couldn't stand it anymore! Here they are posed for a family photo.



With one of the ewes still preggers, look forward to pics, and hopefully video, of even more adorable lambs. We have not experienced an animal birth yet, but we have our labor and delivery suite all ready to go-hopefully. I have no idea when this will happen, could be tonight, tomorrow, or a week from now, so I'm on high alert until the final lambs are born. And the only way to learn is to just do it!

Never a dull moment!

Ugh, Winter

I've been trying to think of a different title for this post, but just can't! Looking at the almost empty, frozen garden and greenhouse, it's hard not to feel a little sad. The growing season flew by and it looks like all the hard work has just disappeared. It doesn't help that I was out of town for the little bit of Fall we did have, as it seems winter has nestled in to stay and it's not even Thanksgiving! Ugh, Winter!

Just a few months ago, I could barely shimmy through the greenhouse, now I could almost do cartwheels!



And the garden was producing so much I could hardly keep up with it. Now Bear can barely find anything to dig up and eat anymore! (can you find Bear in this picture??)



OK, I'll stop lamenting what we don't have and focus on what we do have-let's stay in the garden.

We still have a load of broccoli, just like we did last year, it seems magical to me! This year we also still have beets, turnips, parsnips, leeks, salad and cooking greens. Since almost every night it is getting down in the 20s and for the number of days that haven't made it out of the 30s, I'm pretty happy with that!




The greenhouse looks really empty, but there is promise of a winter garden just getting started out there! Winter greens and salad greens have already been seeds and are sprouting. I also transplanted a bunch of salad greens into a hanging planter, so hopefully we'll be having big salads sooner rather than later! Hopefully when Keith gets home this afternoon, we'll be moving the cold frames into the greenhouse, speeding up the growth of the little sprouts!




And what did we do with everything that the garden produced? It's been canned, or frozen, or is in cold storage. The pantry overflowing with both sweet and savory choices like plum butter, red wine pickled beets, roasted garlic pizza sauce, and huckleberry jam. Not too shabby! And the freezer is full of blanched veggie mixes ready to be popped in soups or stir-fried.



Cold storage is a new experiment and with everything that we had a the end of the season, I had to try it! So, with buckets loaded with root veggies and damp sand living in the shop in the garage, we're going to see how long we get keep all this preserved!




Alright, so we have a lot and still a lot more to do to get everything ready to make it through winter. Today is a beautiful day and it's time to get to work. So I guess I'll stop writing this and go haul a bunch of goat poo to the compost piles! Glamourous, I know!

So, this was a little unexpected

I thought I had one big failure in the garden this summer: potatoes. So much so, there are really no pictures. I really didn't expect this.

I tried the 'straw method' for growing them this year, which mean that I placed my seed potatoes in my prepped raised bed full of rich soil, then covered them with a few inches of straw. As the plants got bigger, I added more straw, until there was a foot to 18 inches of straw above where the taters were planted.

At first this looked great! The plants were growing like crazy, looking healthy, and I just kept piling on the straw. Then it stated raining. It never, well almost never, rains in the summer here and then we get these crazy deluges of rain. Here is a con of the straw method-it doesn't really drain water very well and makes is a fungus breading ground. My bed of potatoes became a text book example of late blight and I fought it! It wasn't severe and I kept spraying (organic) fungicides and changing the watering cycle to improve the situation. The plants started looking a little better.

I was going to take pictures of my beautiful late blight when we got back from a weekend out of town, but while we were gone we had a hard frost and it looked there was nothing in my potato bed but soaking wet straw. Great, wonderful, adding insult to injury, thanks frost!

There was a break in the rain today, so it seemed like a good time to see if there were any taters to salvage and too clean out the bed of straw. I brought out a little bucket...then had to go get another bucket.

Wow, 40 pounds of potatoes later, I'm still shocked! I pulled back the first of the straw and there were huge taters staring back at me and then more, and then more. Buy the end, I was a soaking wet, muddy mess (of course it started raining again!), but really didn't care. I just wanted to get inside to weigh my windfall of potatoes!

So in the pile of taters there are Yukon Golds and Purple Vikings (just purple on the outside, white on the inside).


I'm following the Oregon State extension office tips for storing home grown potatoes. I've washed them and now I'm letting them dry before putting them in a small room upstairs where I can control the humidity with my trusty humidifier, that I will greatly miss the next few nights.

I'm almost certain this should be enough potatoes to last us a long while! If dinner wasn't already going on the stove, I'd be making gnocchi right now! I'm not sure if I'm sold on the straw method, but I'm not sure what I'd try next year either! We'll see!

Holy Jalapenos!

While my tomatoes are taking their sweet time getting ripe, I have been inundated with an insane number of peppers. My jalapeno plants look like they're about to fall over with the weight of all their peppers. I was hoping to be making tons of salsa, but with 5 times more peppers than tomatoes, I had to figure something else out.

Then Keith has a suggestion: Pickle them!

I do not like anything pickled, not a single thing. But, sure, why not! I've never really tried to pickle anything before. So I find this recipe online for Escabeche or the pickled jalapenos you sometimes get a Mexican restaurants and got to harvesting all the ingredients.

I pulled out a bunch of fresh carrots and had some onions and garlic ready to go. I chopped all them to the tune of Bear and BJ crunching on the carrot ends.



I thought harvesting all the jalapenos for this would put a dent in the thick bush of peppers. After picking 32 of them (more than the 1 lb the recipe calls for!), I can say, nope, not even close!



I just followed the instructions. Fried up the veg, then added apple cider vinegar with all the spices. It was a pretty fast and easy canning day!





Keith better freaking love these! We've got 6 jars of this and the whole house, including me, smells spicy and vinegary!



With the number of Anchos, Anaheim's, and jalapenos I still have, I think a chile sauce like this is going to be next-but at least quadrupled!!

See what you've stared Yutoku!